Fact of the day

Information is the most powerful weapon.

Monday

Fact N°
2098

The letter J did not exist until the Renaissance.

The original Latin alphabet omitted some letters we now use, and other letters served multiple purposes ("Z" was once the seventh letter, for example, and then briefly disappeared from the alphabet entirely). The "J" sound was considered part of the "I" sound, which is why, for instance, the inscription on Trajan's Column in Rome spells the emperor's name "TRAIAN." It remained that way until a grammarian named Gian Giorgio Trissino attempted to make improvements to literary Italian; some of his suggestions were disregarded, but his modern versions of the "V" and "J" caught on.

Tuesday

Fact N°
2099

Drunkenness is influenced by the placebo effect.

Researchers in New Zealand found that test subjects who believed they had been drinking alcohol had worse memories than those who didn't. The experiment placed two groups of students in a bar-like atmosphere, but gave one group "vodka tonics" which were actually just water with lime, and then presented both groups with a series of slides and quizzed them on details they had seen. The students who had been "drinking" had comparatively impaired memories, and were more suggestible than their counterparts.

Wednesday

Fact N°
2100

Bill Clinton is currently America's most popular politician.

A Wall Street Journal/NBC poll found that 55% of respondents had a positive view of former President Bill Clinton, while only 23% had a negative view, the best ratio among politicians covered by the survey. The only other two politicians with positive ratios were Barack Obama(47%/41%) and Mike Huckabee (26%/25%). The lowest ratio of possible choices belonged to former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (22%/50%).

Thursday

Fact N°
2101

Harvard was America's first corporation.

The Harvard Corporation is the organizational body that has overseen Harvard University for the past 360 years: the university's first president, Henry Dunster, requested the charter from the General Court of Massachusetts in 1650. The President and Fellows -- its official name, although it's often somewhat ominously referred to as "the Corporation" -- exists in much the same form today.

Friday

Fact N°
2102

Men tend to look at the faces in nude images first.

The Center for Behavioral Neuroscience showed male and female subjects sexual imagery -- photographs of nudes or of couples engaged in sexual activity -- and found that men were more likely than women to look at the face of a nude subject first, and that women spent more time looking at explicitly sexual images. Eye-tracking technology suggested that while men were comparably uniform in what they paid attention to, female subjects' focus tended to depend on their hormonal state.

Saturday

Fact N°
2103

Drinking alcohol doesn't kill brain cells.

Several studies, including a laborious 1993 survey that involved literally counting the neurons in tissue samples, have found no substantive difference between the neuron density in alcoholics' and non-alcoholics' brains. Alcohol does have an adverse effect on cognition, though; the branch-like structures at the ends of neurons ("dendrites") become damaged and transmit electrochemical stimulation poorly. The good news is that some of this damage can be reversed -- as long as it isn't too severe -- simply by refraining from drinking.

Sunday

Fact N°
2104

The name of a 10-gallon hat has nothing to do with volume.

Though the origin of the term is in dispute, the "10-gallon" moniker almost certainly doesn't describe the volume of the hat -- for one thing, the average 10-gallon hat only boasts a capacity of about one gallon. A more plausible explanation is that "galon" is the Spanish word for braid, and hats of this type, originally worn by the vaqueros in Mexico, wore narrow braided bands on their sombreros: the "10-gallon" designation was most likely just a measurement of hatband width.